Critique Of Class Research Articles

Teaching German from a decolonial perspective: Critical dystopia as critique of race, gender, and class in Unternehmer

Teaching German from a decolonial perspective: Critical dystopia as critique of race, gender, and class in Unternehmer

Deviations and Displacements of Motherhood: On Ana Katz’s "Mi amiga del parque" (2015)

Drawing upon gender studies, feminist theory, and film analysis, we examine Mi amiga del parque (Ana Katz, 2015) with the aim of investigating how film genres are questioned as part of a critique of class and gender relations. We argue that the feminist mark of Katz’s cinema brings about an attitude which is akin to the act of listening: it does not promote a lecture-like verbiage, but amplifies a keen perception of social repetition processes. The film’s anticipatory position not only rejects univocal, closed, self-contained or propaganda-like rhetoric, but also contributes to the extremely vital presentation of structural and ideological conflicts expressed in family and social contradictions, starting with the relationships between women. Our conclusions show the profound innovation regarding genres linked to the positing of new gender relations that resist patriarchal capitalist ties.

PLEASURE+GENDER+PLAY

From the start, play and game studies scholars have investigated the experiences of women and girls who play games online, as well as gendered assumptions around digital as well as non-digital play (Brunner et al., 2000; Bryce & Rutter, 2002; Delamere & Shaw, 2008; Fron et al., 2007a, 2007b; Pearce, 2009). Scholars have challenged ideas such as that girls and women have weaker gameplay skills than boys and men (Jenson & De Castell, 2008), that women are not interested in competitive play (Taylor, 2006), that girls and women are different in their play experiences and interests (Royse et al., 2007) and that women are not frequent or loyal players (Consalvo & Begy, 2015; Williams et al., 2009). However, there is still more to learn about how women, girls, boys, men, nonbinary and other individuals play, as well as how gender can play an important role beyond as an identity marker in playful expressions as well as normative expectations for play. This panel offers new ways of examining how gender, games, and other forms of online play, can be analyzed and understood. These four papers argue for a more nuanced understanding of gender and play, further challenging gaming culture’s preoccupation that certain games and certain styles of play are more “valid” than others (Consalvo & Paul, 2019). To do that, we offer fresh analytical tools, different theoretical lenses and underexplored sites for study. $2 “No Need For Speed” makes a unique contribution to gaming and play literature, offering a new articulation of the temporal experiences within and external to game play - especially in COVID/pandemic times. In particular, the authors argue that the concept of “slow gaming,” might offer new possibilities for both our experiences of play and the way that time within the games industry itself is being reconceptualized. The authors offer three different games as examples of how “slow gaming” challenges our relationship to play, domesticity, notions of gender, and labor practices within the gaming industry more broadly. This paper argues that playing slow games, or playing games slowly, might provide a unique political rejoinder to contemporary life under late capitalism. $2 Two papers in this panel bring underutilized theoretical frameworks to the study of gender and games: examining how socioeconomic class and boundary keeping intersect with gender and gameplay in important ways. The presentation “Working for hearts: Social class and time management games” reads popular casual games such as Sally’s Spa through an intersectional critique. Adding to gendered examinations of casual games (Chess, 2012, 2017), this paper brings in a critique of social class. It does so through exploring the classed positions of jobs in these games, as well as how the player’s agency is limited both through classed expectations of certain occupations as well as further undermined by particular design decisions and gameplay mechanics as well as game narratives. It demonstrates how class is an important aspect of identity that can help us better understand gaming representations. The second paper to bring in underutilized theory is “Gendered expectations of playing nice, boundary keeping and problematic/toxic behaviors in casual video game communities.” This paper offers a different way of understanding the role of toxic behavior and players in game communities: through the sociological lens of boundary keeping. While not dismissing the real effects of harassment, it explores how activities such as trolling and other problematic gameplay is defined differently within different player groups, how it can strengthen some in-game communities or spur the creation of groups dedicated to combating such problems, and in the process helping to further enrich and make more inclusive gaming culture. $2 “Girls, Platforms, and Play” examines an offline form of gendered play and competition – pre-teen and teen girls riding hobbyhorses – and how the activity has been differently contested and/or constructed on two platforms: YouTube and Instagram. Legacy media video content of hobbyhorse competitions uploaded to YouTube inevitably have led – given YouTube’s largely antisocial comment culture (Burgess & Green, 2018) – to hobbyhorsers’ activities to be delegitimized for a number of reasons by commenters: mainly, because it’s just girls playing with toys, not participating in a sport; or because it is an athletic endeavor, but its participants should compete in a “real” sport, like track and field; or because it’s not real equestrianism. Instagram's affordances, which help encourage connections among subculture participants and the creation of communities (Leaver, Highfield, & Abidin, 2020), have allowed hobbyhorse enthusiasts to create a space of their own online.

Sarah Scott’s Narrative “No Place”: Gazing and Utopia in Millenium Hall

Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762) is framed by a male narrator for an imagined male reader, and it lacks a substantial critique of slavery, empire, or class; the status of this novel as an example of utopia is therefore an ongoing question. I argue that the utopic vision in the novel happens at the level of fictionality. Millenium Hall is about reforming the sentimental gaze of the male narrator and, by extension, the reader of the novel. Scott critiques sentimentality, particularly the sentimental gaze upon the spectacle of the suffering woman as voyeuristic and inherently sexual. In its stead, she offers a didactic and morally instructive form of looking that avoids titillating scenes of suffering. The novel disrupts and tempers sentimental plots by providing women characters a refuge from sentimentality in the form of the Hall. Renewed attention to Scott’s critique of the sentimental can challenge assumptions about the role of the sentimental mode in eighteenth-century women’s writings.

Conjuring Kuwait Onstage: An Interview with Mohammed Al-Hemely

Conjuring Kuwait Onstage: An Interview with Mohammed Al-Hemely Yasmine Marie Jahanmir (bio) and Reno Hassan Hajiyah (bio) Mohammed Al-Hemely (b.1986), producer, director, and actor, shines brightly in the constellation of commercial theatre offered in Kuwait.1 His splashy spectacles are peppered with recognizable Western influences and inspired by theatrical innovation he seeks out in London each summer. They are extremely popular with Kuwaiti audiences, often selling out the entire run. His career started early: acting with the historic Al-Shabab [youth] Theater group under the auspices of the Youth Public Authority. In 2011, Al-Hemely founded his personal theatre company, Backstage Group, and has presented numerous comedies, thrillers, children’s shows, and musicals. Unlike most Kuwaiti commercial theatre, which occurs in rented and temporarily converted spaces, often sport clubs, Al-Hemely bought and renovated the Medical Professions Theater in Jabriya (an urban district in Kuwait City). This building is a point of pride for Al-Hemely, and it allows him to extend the runs of sold-out shows, remount previous shows because there is costume and set storage, and most importantly, gives him the freedom to produce theatre all year-round. Al-Hemely’s most popular and longest-running play, Mujab (2018; see the trailer at https://youtu.be/-OWxlm6WISA), which he wrote, directed, and plays the role of Sror, has run on and off for over two years. The play, set in unnamed slums of Kuwait, centers on Om Sror (mother of Sror), a leader of a hidden community that authorities have at best forgotten and at worst demonized (fig. 1). With a reputation for being an exorcist, Om Sror defends her threatened neighborhood from authorized demolition by spreading rumors of possession and inciting fear among the ranks of the police investigators. Based in comedic improvisation, like most of Kuwaiti commercial theatre, this eclectic, humorous, and supernatural play hints at social critique of class, race, and structural inequality. Mujab is also popular with Kuwaiti audiences because it is steeped in folk traditions. In Arabic, Mujab translates as “service and honoring” and often refers to exorcism. As the audience saunters from the box office to their seats, they experience a full-sensory transition into the world of the play with the scent of Al-Yawi bakhour, a type of woodchip incense particular to exorcism. Live drumming accompanies a recording of traditional-style Arabian gulf music such as Tanboura—a music specific to exorcisms called zar. Zar is a type of spirit-possession ritual that originated in East Africa.2 Actors encourage the audience to sing and clap with them while offering bakhour and watermelon (figs. 2–3). Mujab reflects a multifaceted Kuwait onstage by examining the extant social tensions between rich and poor, traditional and modern, and real and supernatural. In Mujab, Al-Hemely successfully explores these contradictions, all while presenting a wildly entertaining farcical play that is, at least in terms of box-office receipts, the most popular play in Kuwait’s recent history. When we sat down with Al-Hemely in December 2019, his enthusiasm to promote his vision of Kuwaiti culture was evident.3 He had just released a film, The End (2019), uniquely shot entirely in Kuwait. Closure of theatres around the world due to COVID-19 did not abet Al-Hemely’s drive, as he produced one of the first Zoom plays in the Arabic region. No matter what the future holds, there is no doubt that Al-Hemely will continue to make spectacular, comedic, and thoughtful shows that will shape the future of Kuwait’s popular entertainment landscape. [End Page e51] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Sama (Samah) and Tabil (Abdullah Al-Ramyan) are lighting the Al-Yawi bakhour (incense specific to exorcism) during the ritual. (Photo: Nawaf Alsharaf.) Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 2. Sror (Mohammed Al-Hemely), Om Sror (Haifaa Adel), and ensemble invite the spirits while the Al-Zar (exorcism) music is playing. (Photo: Nawaf Alsharaf.) [End Page e-52] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 3. Om Sror (Haifaa Adel) begins the exorcism ritual while the ensemble plays the Tar (drums), an instrument associated with zar. (Photo: Nawaf...

The Circus and the Deadly Child: Ruptures of Social Code in Jude the Obscure

Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure has frequently been read as Hardy›s social critique of marriage, class, and systemic education. Readings of the novel in this critical tradition have a tendency to simplify the text into an allegory emergent from Hardy’s own biography. I seek to destabilize these readings by instead engaging with the text as one not concerned with institutions but rather the underlying social codes that give them coherence. By pairing Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of speech and counter speech with Lee Edelman’s queer critique of child-centered futurity, I offer a new reading of the novel that privileges codes and legibility as central to the novel’s critical project.

Sociology beyond social class: the theoretical status of race and sex

In this article, I elaborate a critique of social class as the concept is commonly employed in sociological analysis, that is, as the category that allegedly provides the most adequate picture of the basic social relations of modern societies. We should keep in mind that beneath such pretense of realism lie normative concerns. Thus, I argue that extra-economic and extra-mercantile mechanisms for the distribution of power and wealth, such as the division of sexes, continue to act within modern capitalism; this is similar to what happens within peripheries and areas of colonial expansion, as expressed through the category of race. In the contemporary post-colonial world, sociology must move forward to conceive of race and sex as social relations not to be confounded with objects linked to genetics and biology; rather, together with social classes, they structure power relations and exploitation. In the present text, I defend the thesis that the movement which constitutes sociology as a discipline that conceives social phenomena as independent from their connections to the natural world only comes to true fruition when it takes on the study of the social definition of the sexes.

“But the baby of course is the first object”: The Superfluous Infant in Trollope’s Comic Marriage Novel

Victorians Journal 55 “©at the baby of course is the first object”: The Superfluous Infant in Trollope’s Comic Marriage Novel by Tamara Wagner Trollope’s uncompromising realism imbues the everyday of highlife with a wry sense of comedy. He excels in detailing the familiar, laying bare the mundane private lives of the elite and ofthe middling classes that attempt to emulate or marry into these higher ranks of a rapidly changing society. Examples include the famous bedroom conversations of the Archdeacon and his wife in the Barchester Chronicles, the domestic lives of politicians in the Palliser series, and altogether his critical insight into marriage at a time when its significance as an alliance and a contract underwent crucial changes. Throughout his representations of married life, Trollope eschews sentimentality and sensationalism alike. In his autobiography, he might have asserted an ambiguity about “sensationalist and anti-sensationalist” writers and readers, claiming that a “good novel should be both [realistic and sensational], and both in the highest degree” (2.41-42); but his rejection of sentimentalism remained fervent. It arguably formed the most defining characteristic of his realism and was in pointed opposition to the style of Dickens, whom he dubbed “Mr. Popular Sentiment” in a particularly biting passage in The Warden. 1 In Trollope’s comic explorations of marriage and family life there is, however, a revealing doublesidedness in the way he places babies, an aspect of Victorian culture that, I further contend, has altogether been curiously sidelined in critical discussions. A close analysis of how Trollope engages with what he terms “Baby Worship” (ch. 16) in Barchester Towers helps us to re-evaluate the surprisingly neglected figure of the baby in Victorian literature. The comic marriage novel Is He Popenjoy? pits Trollope’s satirical evocation of “baby worship” against the larger 1 Compare Meckier (ch. 2) on what he has termed “the realism wars.” 56 Victorians Journal structural function of the expected heir as the pivot on which an outwardly conventional narrative ofinheritance can turn and thereby be turned into something else. “to impress her with the solemnity of married life”: expectations of Modem Marriage in Is fiePopenjoy? Is He Popenjoy? is Trollope’s most bizarrely comic marriage novel. It traces the coming of age of a young woman after her marriage, providing painstakingly detailed insight into married life in the Victorian upper and middle classes. The novel describes the transformation that “a little girl... not pretending to any self-action” (IHP 202) undergoes when she becomes a married woman, and how marriage makes her “learn to be a woman” (48). Yet the double­ standards inherent in her husband’s appreciation ofhow she “had lost her childish little timidities, and had bloomed forth a beautiful woman”—although, “as to the childish timidity, perhaps he would have preferred that it should not have been so quickly or so entirely banished” (315)—is presented tongue-in-cheek, as is his plan to “impress her with the solemnity of married life” (178). The lightheartedness ofone ofTrollope’s most refreshingly lively female characters is in pointed contrast to the ridiculed solemnity of her serious but “not very clever” husband (327). In detailing their contrasting expectations, shifting hopes, and ideas ofmarried life, the novel maps out diverging concepts of marriage, domestic realities, and a married woman’s rights and duties at the time. Although conventional approaches to Trollope’s fiction often take his provocatively blunt pronouncements—such as his notorious suggestion in North America that “[t]he best right a woman has is the right to a husband” (2.72)—at face value, Deborah Denenholz Morse’s seminal Women in Trollope’s Palliser Novels has instigated an important revaluation of his much more nuanced and often self­ consciously ambiguous representation of gender. More recently, in an essay entitled “Trollope the Feminist,” Morse adds that, in “his dissection of masculine privilege in Victorian culture and society,” Trollope’s “critique of the lassitude and misogyny of aristocratic Englishmen [is] coupled with his loving depiction of vibrant women,” such as a stablekeeper’s granddaughter in Is He Popenjoy?', Victorians Journal 57 thus “Trollope’s critique of gender is imbricated with a critique of social class and nationhood” (np...

Professional Sport and Shaw's Cashel Byron

George Bernard Shaw's early romantic novel about a prizefighter, Cashel Byron's Profession (1882) is possibly the first literary treatment of the risks, compulsions and social hypocrisies surrounding professional sport. It offers a critique of class, work and leisure, of the nineteenth-century bildungsroman, of violence as a spectacle and of the distinction between professional and amateur. In the ‘Preface’ and ‘Note on Modern Prizefighting’, added to the 1901 edition, Shaw provided both a history of prizefighting and a trenchant critique of the public taste for violence which, as he saw it, encouraged the emergence of professional boxing with gloves, under the Queensberry rules, as an even more brutal and dangerous spectacle. Shaw's intimate knowledge of the world of prizefighting, in decline in the 1880s, and his examination of the life of an athlete in a dangerous ‘profession’, open up a critical juncture in the history of modern sport.

Reading Class Instruction from Three Perspectives: A Critique of an Elementary Social Studies Class on Cultural Assets

Reading Class Instruction from Three Perspectives: A Critique of an Elementary Social Studies Class on Cultural Assets

Interpretation As Phantasmagoria: Variations On A Theme On Marx's Theses On Feuerbach

Despite Louis Althusser's description of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach as the lighting flash that announces a major event in philosophy, breaking the night of an idealist past by glimpsing at the new world through the discovery of an unknown continent of knowledge, it may not be an error to say that not only is not sufficient space given to these small notes, but also the new continent of knowledge was never known, or at best partially known in its evolutionary form. There are two possibilities: one that the lighting flash has concealed more than it is to reveal—the new continent is hidden and colonized (or as one will say savaged by the counterrevolutionary Stalin)—and the second possibility is that numerous readings have taken place, thus almost leading to manifold political positions (or academic positions if you will). One recalls Antonio Gramsi's ‘philosophy of praxis’—where praxis as revolutionary will and action forms the leitmotiv of Marxist repertoire. The ‘laws’ of Marxism are thus read as a fiction to be dissolved as nothing but theological postulations. Marxism is here understood as a humanism and historicism, clearly to be differentiated from the positivist, or almost onto-theological renderings of Marxism. There is another reading, that of Althusser, who defines Marxism as a ‘different practice of philosophy’. And yet, as one, would argue this different practice could never be articulated, because the nature of the continent was never known. Etienne Balibar in his post-Marxist zeal says that Marxism is ‘not a philosophy of action, but action itself, action “sans phrases” … ’ It is keeping these above-mentioned thinkers in mind that we turn our attention to the Theses. The first point that one needs to make is: where stands the very discourse of interpretation in revolutionary Marxism? Is interpretation as interpretation to be abolished? In this sense is not merely philosophical hermeneutics to be negated but the entire Western tradition from Aristotle to Kant? One turns immediately to the last and the most celebrated of the Theses—‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’. An immediate response is the critique of theoretism in the history of philosophy, where the philosophers as seekers of the elixir of life have succumbed to the alienation inherent in the capitalist division of labour. In contrast to these well-known claims (Gramsci, Althusser and Balibar) this essay reads the Theses from a different perspective—the perspective of the critique of the estrangement principle and the birth of revolutionary materialism, a materialism that is distinct from ‘old’ materialism and most certainly from the distorted onto-theological materialism of the ‘diamat’ ideologists of the Soviet regime. What we shall be claiming is that the new continent—historical materialism—has within it the black hole of alienation. Thus whilst the first terrain (historical materialism) was made visible the other (the black hole) was repressed and forgotten. In these variations on a theme on the Theses on Feuerbach we are relating the Theses with his 1843–44 critique of Hegel (the principle of the Aufhebung und Verwirklichung der Philosophie), the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 as well as with Capital such that Marx's exploration of the black hole can lead both to the critique of class societies as well as to its distinct transcendence. We shall be reading the Theses like reading a musical score—the last of the Theses as the Rondo Allegro is the summation of the themes spelt out in the ten above notes.

Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday : The Geography of Class in Late-Victorian Britain

A regular feature of Ally Sloper's Half-Holiday, an illustrated comic newspaper published from 1884 until 1923?though sporadically after 1916, is Ally Sloper's travels in and around London and to the seaside.1 Ally's journeys and their chronicling by his daughter Tootsie serve as kind of travel literature for the working-class and lower-middle-class readership of the paper. On one hand, Tootsie's accounts of Poor Papa running afoul of Victorian ideas about social decorum, whether at the seaside, back stage at a music hall, at Ascot, at the Lord Mayor's Ball, in the pit at Drury Lane, at the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, or countless other places, are mere back drop for the paper's jokes and satires. On the other hand, the vast range of locales and events visited by Ally and his motley band of companions serves to give us a sense of the types of places the varied readership of Ally Sloper's Half-Holiday (ASHH) may have visited in search of leisure. These travelogues tell us what the Victorian readership of the paper may have actually done (or hoped to do) while there. I emphasis the Victorian readership of the paper because even though ASHH continued publishing well into the twentieth century, I am largely concerned with the Victorian versions of the paper and have confined my discussion and examples to the 1880s and 1890s. Beyond telling us where the paper's Victorian readers may have gone on their holidays and showing us what they may have done once there, ASHH engages in a sustained critique of class. In short, ASHH operates as a satirical geography of leisure and class of the late-Victorian era in which physical and class boundaries are overcome with a degree of ease and even shown to be unimportant. In its critique of late-Victorian class, we can see the ways in which popular culture has the potential to

White lies: Amelia E. Johnson's Sunday School fiction and the politics of racelessness

This article reevaluates the cultural significance and literary complexity of the Sunday School novels published by Amelia E. Johnson during the 'Black Woman's Era'. The critical recovery of this lesser-known African American woman writer and editor focuses on her cultural activism and on the fictional strategies she deployed to challenge the limitations imposed by a white-dominated audience and publishing industry, as well as by the religious orthodoxy promoted by her denominational publishers. Problematizing the critical discourse that opposes her confrontational non-fiction writing to her racially indeterminate fiction, the article foregrounds Johnson's critique of gender, class and racial inequalities, her experimentation with narrative conventions, and her growing sense of disillusionment in the face of unrelenting discrimination, showing how Johnson's writing career illuminates the broader trends of African American women's literature at the turn into the 20th century.

Queering Whiteness, Queering Faulkner: Hightower’s “Wild Bulges”

Alfred J. Lopez Queering Whiteness, Queering Faulkner: Hightower’s “Wild Bulges” i. I should clarify from the outset that I am not a Faulknerian by any stretch, and so am not interested in producing a reading of Faulkner’s novel that “solves” its many ambivalences and inconsistencies, its hints and feints toward a critique of race, class, and gender as repressed but active dis­ courses at work in the Jim Crow South. Such an analysis would lie beyond not only this essay but also my own expertise. Rather, I wish to use a particular character in a particular novel—the defrocked minister Gail Hightower, from Light in August—as a way of opening an inquiry into how current approaches to whiteness studies, especially those attuned to the ways in which gay and lesbian whites are somehow “marked” by their distance from heteronormative whiteness, may prove useful to the reading and interpretation of U.S. Southern literature generally, and Faulkner in particular. It is axiomatic in whiteness studies that whiteness derives much of its power paradoxically from its invisibility—the idea that whiteness is not a “race,” that it is in fact nothing at all—the “powerful position ... of being ‘just’ human,” as Richard Dyer deftly puts it (2). One result of the invisibility of whiteness as an ethnic, racial, or class position is that it assumes the role of a universal discourse of “civility” and even “humanness,” which then sits in judgment of the nonwhite world; thus other races, ethnicities, and sexualities exist as gradations of distance from the idealized, invisible norm of hetero­ normative bourgeois whiteness.1 As Dyer further explains, “White power . . . reproduces itself regardless of intention, power differences and goodwill, and overwhelmingly because it is not seen as whiteness, but as normal” (10; emphasis mine). In such a model, as Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz among others have pointed out, regional categories within a larger hegemonic na­ tional identity, such as Southernness within a U.S. context, always already constitute a “mark” of difference, the damning mark of a regional difference that also represents an irreducible distance from the unspoken, invisible norms of whiteness.2 'For a more thorough explication of the assumptions of whiteness studies, see Dyer 1-40. 2See Wray and Newitz 1-15. 74 The FaulknerJournal Fall 2006/Spring 2007 75 Sexuality operates as one possible parameter of such difference, and thus distance, from heteronormative whiteness. As I have argued elsewhere, one sig­ nificant feature common to many colonial queer white texts, especially those with an element of Bildungsroman (but really any coming-into-self-knowledge narrative), is the protagonist’s burgeoning realization of desire for the racial Other, thus contradicting the official dictates and unofficial norms of both ra­ cial purity and heteronormativity. As Dyer explains, “[this desire] is the felt connection between gays and ethnic minorities, as much as romantic and sex­ ual encounters with non-white men” (6)—the idea of a shared condition of markedness in relation to heteronormative whiteness, rather than the fact of any sexual encounter itself—that overrides other considerations of transgression or taboo. I want to open the essay with the question of whether queer moments in U.S. Southern texts such as Light in August reveal precisely this kind of op­ positional cultural logic. Gail Hightower’s queerness represents a sort of thread of connectedness that runs through Light in August, one which aligns him with other marginalized whites (Byron Bunch, Lena Grove) and others of more am­ bivalent racial and sexual subject positions (Joe Christmas, who claims to be black, may be part Mexican, and slips in and out of active and passive sexual roles throughout the novel).3 More importantly, in chapter 20 of Faulkner’s novel, Hightower himself comes to a limited, incomplete reckoning with his long-suppressed sexuality, a reckoning that offers as intimate a portrait as one may find in U.S. Southern literature of the divided, repressed psyche of closeted gay whiteness in the Jim Crow South. One could in fact argue that Light in Au­ gust itself represents a sort of theoretical intervention, a reinscription of queer histories into modernization, into a neocolonial society trying to reinvent itself...

In Search of the British Indian in British India: White Orphans, Kipling's Kim, and Class in Colonial India

Contemporary scholars struggling to keep their work politically meaningful and efficacious often, with the best of intentions, invoke the triad of race, gender and class. But though this three-part mantra is persistently and even passionately recited, usually in the introductory paragraphs of a scholarly piece, ‘attentive listening,’ as historian Douglas M. Peers asserts, ‘reveals that class is sounded with little more than a whisper’ (825). Unlike the other two, class largely remains an under-explored and, consequently, little understood category of experience and inquiry. I can say with certainty that this is true in my own field of postcolonial studies, with its sub-discipline of colonial discourse analysis. In part because of the politically justifiable emphasis on race in postcolonial research and theory (and only later, through feminist insistence, was that emphasis broadened to include gender), we have yet to develop as sustained, various, and subtle a critique of class as that which now exists for race and gender.

Politics and history in William Golding: the world turned upside down

Provides a politicized and historicized reading of William Golding's novels as a counter to previous, universalizing criticism. Paul Crawford here argues that an understanding of fantastic and carnivalesque modes in Golding's work is vital if we are to appreciate fully his interrogation of 20th-century life. Golding's early satirical novels question English constructions of national identity in opposition to Nazism and the totalitarian personality. For Crawford, Golding can and must be studied in the wider European tradition of literature of atrocity. His early novels, especially Lord of the Flies, are preoccupied with atrocity, whereas the later work betrays a greater concern for the status of language and literature. In Golding's later fiction, like Darkness Visible, the fantastic and carnivalesque are used in an increasingly nonsatirical manner to complement first modernist and then postmodernist self-consciousness and indeterminacy. Even his critique of class and religious authority, which carries through all of his fiction, gives way to more lighthearted productions - a symptom of which is his crude, absurd attack against the English literary industry in Paper Men. This reduction of satire marks a decline in Golding's political commitment and the production of more complex and arguably less satisfying novels. The fantastic and carnivalesque are foundational to both the satirical and nonsatirical approaches that mark Golding's early and late fiction. Crawford directly links Golding's various deployments of the fantastic and carnivalesque to historical, political, and social change.

PLAY UP

Over the past three decades, a substantial body of critical literature has emerged in the sociology of sport. Its main critical impulse has been to overcome the sociological neglect of sport and popular culture, and to undermine the predominantly functionalist analytical foundation of the sports sociology that did exist. Sport has, therefore, been subjected to orthodox sociological critique of class, gender, and racial/ethnic inequality of unquestionable force and value. However, the sociology of sport, like the general discipline, is required to confront current challenges to its founding assumptions, categories, and procedures. This article seeks to assess the state of the critical sociology of sport, arguing that, although its principal concerns with social power and the conditions of resistance to it must endure, there is an urgent need for new and perhaps unorthodox theoretical and empirical work that will allow that critical edge to be maintained.

A Critique of Race, Ethnicity, and Social Class in Recent Leisure-Recreation Research

The study of black-white differences in leisure activities has not produced conclusive or cumulative results. Among the factors responsible are a failure to adequately define and operationalize the...

Book reviews: Rich and Poor in New Zealand: A Critique of Class, Politics and Ideology David Bedggood, George Allen and Unwin, Auckland, 1980, pp. 178, $5.50

book reviews: Rich and Poor in New Zealand: A Critique of Class, Politics and Ideology David Bedggood, George Allen and Unwin, Auckland, 1980, pp. 178, $5.50

Reviews

Rich and Poor in New Zealand: A Critique of Class, Politics and Ideology, Social Policy and the Welfare State in New Zealand, The Framework of Industrial Law in New Zealand, Industrial Society: Class Clevage and Control, The Control of Work, The Workless State: Studies in Umemployment, A Professional Union: the Evolution of the Institution of Professional Civil Servants, Strikes